Thanks to the good people at our home-study agency the "redo" took like 5 minutes and the documents are being Fedex'd back to our placement agency today. That means early next week our entire dossier will be on it's way to Moscow. Our agency does the translation of the documents in their Moscow office. I'm not certain how long it will take but I'm pretty sure it's going to be a couple of weeks. We have a plethora of papers and I can't believe they all can be translated into Russian all that quickly, but we'll see. As always, I'd rather be a bit more conservative in estimating the time it takes to get things done.

Our agency had some optimistic comments on their hotline earlier this week regarding their NGO application. And considering the fact that they always try to err on a more pessimistic/conservative tone, we're feeling pretty upbeat. If you recall, my own guesstimate was that they would be getting their NGO registration in the mid September timeframe (which was more optimistic than what our agency felt which was end of September/early part of October). So we'll see, hopefully we'll have some good news in a few days.

Regardless, and to my knowledge, NONE of the 8 agencies who currently have passed the NGO registration have their accreditation done. And that must occur before they can continue operations inside Russia. The timing of when agencies will get their reaccreditation is about as clear as mud. But the current best/worst case scenarios are from several weeks to several months.

"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."